To satisfy the demands for 3-D reviewing in plant design

a multi-resolution rendering approach for large-scale process plant models based on programmable graphics pipelines is proposed.Based on the analysis of the characteristics of a process plant model

a multi-resolution model of the object is constructed according to the multi-resolution templates of the basic voxels.In the generation process of the multi-resolution

model the proposed approach can ensure that the vertex set of the low-resolution model is the subset of the vertex set of the high-resolution model.There fore

only the vertex information of the highest resolution model and some of the vertex indexes need to be saved for every object.On this basis

with the effective management of the vertex buffer and the index buffer

a multi-resolution model transform can be implemented according to the vertex index transform in the rendering process.In addition

the data exchange between main memory and display memory can be reduced.Examples show that the approach presented in this paper can be implemented on a general PC and satisfy actual work demands from the designer.It can preprocess a 21 M triangles model within 10 and achieve 31 frame/s smooth frame rates on average

without using extra hard-disk space.